Daniël Trujillo

MIT CSAIL PhD researcher in computer architecture and microarchitectural security. He co-authored TONTOU research on exploiting post-neutralization windows in Spectre v2 mitigations on AMD and Intel CPUs, and previously contributed to the Inception transient-execution attack research.

TONTOU Exploits a Timing Gap in Spectre Mitigations

MIT CSAIL researchers Daniel Trujillo and Mengjia Yan argue that processor defenses against Spectre can fail in the brief interval after a bad prediction is neutralized but before it is fully prevented from influencing execution. Their TONTOU attack uses carefully timed interrupts and cache delays to reopen that path, allowing a new speculative misprediction that can expose protected data. In a demonstration on affected AMD Zen processors, the team leaked password-hash data from the protected `/etc/shadow` file.

MIT CSAILAug 19, 20264 min read